Pro Publica
One stab at the new journalism business model – putting the investigative journalists upstream of the newspapers.
This model might actually work. Investigative journalism is expensive and newspapers are finding that they cannot afford to keep this infrastructure in-house. Instead, investigative journalism would be outsourced to an organization specializing in the field, which would then sell pieces to the newspapers or publish their own. There might be significant economies of scale and savings associated with an organization specializing in investigative journalism. Such an organization could keep more newspapers in business, who could then concentrate on less expensive endeavors. On the other hand, this kind of wholesale investigative journalism organization might be more opaque – easily politicized and steered towards investigating certain parties and topics, with the public less able to discern the bias of a supplier of news up the supply chain from the newspaper rather than the bias of the newspaper itself.
